Are we tired of computer posts yet? My Pi acquisition, along with a growing interest in linux and open source software has been taking up a lot of my time lately. And I need to write this stuff down, since that was one of the reasons why I started this blog, way, way back when… It’s sort of my backup memory for all things computer related. So you get to suffer.

Control my Data?

Speaking of why, having control of my own data has also been a big thing with me. Part of it was a lack of belief that the Googles or Apples of the world would last (and I’ve mostly been wrong about that) and that my images/blog/posts etc. would still be accessible a decade later… The blogspot blog I started back in 2002, is still going strong and L still posts to it sporadically. Still, I regularly download my Facebook  info, repost all my tweets and instagrams to this site and have hosted this  blog on servers I control since day one.

With the advent of cloud sharing controlling your own stuff became much more complex. I fell immediately in love with Dropbox. But I was initially (and still am to a certain degree) very cautious about what I put on their servers. It’s hard not to imagine some nameless drone rifling through my folders because he/she was bored. These days I am a bit more knowledgeable and this a bit more optimistic but still… the amount of leverage governments have over corporations should not be underestimated. (This is an interesting article about information sharing agreements between countries and highlights a few instances where they have pressured companies to not only spy on clients/customers but also not be allowed to disclose that they are doing so.)

Honestly, at the end of the day, I am not that paranoid, and don’t actually do much that any government agency would be interested in … but ya know…frankly, its none of their damn business… And I just don’t want anyone erasing or altering what is mine without me having my own copies. 😉

NextCloud

Anyway, back to Dropbox (and Google Drive—which makes me crazy although recently it’s gotten better—and iCloud and even Microsoft OneDrive to name the services I have access to). I’ve always wondered if I wouldn’t be better off using some sort of cloud/NAS (network-attached storage) of my own to store my stuff but it hass always turned out to be too much money for not enough security.  (And basically that is still true, despite what the rest of this post implies.)

But a few days ago I discovered Nextcloud.

Apparently its just one of a bunch of self-hosted cloud solutions but it had good reviews so I decided to look into it. And wow. Just…wow. Totally open source and free; with desktop and mobile client apps and enough functionality that you could replace the whole google suite: mail, documents, sharing, calendars etc.

Download it, make some space on a hard drive, install it and forward a url to the computer and voila..your own personal dropbox service!

After a bunch of tinkering (I got stubborn and wanted to run it in a Docker container and that made my life much harder than it had to be) and it is now running happily on my Pi (and mac and iphone).  I can now take a picture with my phone and have it synced to my desktop moments later. I also have a shared folder set up with L so anything I put in that folder appears in her setup as well (we use this function on Dropbox quite a lot to  move files from her ecosystem to mine and back). I’ll be testing and playing with it for the next few weeks just see how well it runs.

The Pros and Cons List

Pros:

  • pretty darn private and all on my own physical hard drives.
  • unlimited space (at least until I fill up the drive)
  • free
  • easy to use and setup (at least the client part of it)

Cons:

  • not quite as secure as it could be although I am using ssl and looking into encryption which is available
  • not guaranteed 24/7 uptime since its on my server and Shaw’s network
  • I would need a separate Pi, and a couple of new harddrives to mirror each other if I was actually going to use it instead of Dropbox…which takes it from free to ~$200–300

A word about Docker

Docker is a sort of virtual containerizing system. You can install whatever software you want to run in the “container” and it is separated from the rest of your machine. That way you can install things and be assured they won’t screw with the rest of your setup. The disadvantage is that being separate, it is harder to get things to talk to each other.

Since NextCloud needed to talk to outside my home network and vice versa, it needed to go through Nginx Proxy Manager which also ran in a Docker container. They didn’t really want to talk to each other as they were on “different” networks. After much fussing I had to take down my original Nginx container and make a new one that ran both Nginx and Nextcloud in the same container in order to get  it to work. That means if/when I abandon NextCloud I will have to set up Nginx all over again.